When the room is empty and the door clicks shut, Jack stands dumbly in the gray light of the afternoon. Then he shoves a desk and yells, “Shit!”

He settles his breathing and tucks his laptop into his shoulder bag, then walks into the hall. He’s scheduled for office hours but doesn’t want to risk running into the Tapir, whose office is three doors down, so he takes the stairs to the ground floor and steps outside into the chill. It’s not raining so much as misting, and the air smells like briny black dirt. As he follows the walkways, puddled and yarned with drowned earthworms, he keeps his head down and thinks about the end of his teaching career. Maybe after he’s denied tenure, he can get a job working for UPS. That’s always seemed appealing to him. Driving around all day, listening to the radio. Staying in shape by hoisting boxes and tromping up porches. He would have no real boss and everyone would be happy to see him, because the UPS man was like Santa in brown shorts.

Yes. That’s what he’ll do. He’ll become a UPS man. It’s decided. The only thing that could possibly save him from this fate is magically winning a Benjamin Franklin Award or suddenly stumbling onto a scientific breakthrough.

Just as the rain starts back up again, he arrives at the new Life Sciences Complex, a massive, two-hundred-thousand-square-foot windowed building with an attached greenhouse, where his lab is located. He’s officially in charge of two grad students, but aside from signing their forms and allotting them grant money, he hasn’t done much for them. He’s been trying to make up for that lately by offering to coauthor a paper and personally taking on more field assignments when calls come in from the university’s extension office.

One of the projects they’re currently pursuing concerns a monster. Most people think that the blue whale is the largest organism on earth, but it’s actually a fungus. A vast pathogenic fungus that takes up 2,384 acres in the Pacific Northwest and is estimated to be over eight thousand years old.

On the surface, the yellow-capped honey mushrooms pop up, but beneath the soil, the rhizomorphs slowly finger their way outward, filaments that weave tighter and tighter together, eventually forming a kind of mat. The digestive enzymes that it secretes kill conifers. Individual units are known as hyphae, but the larger network is called the mycelium. These are identical cells that communicate and coordinate for a common purpose. Botanists have tried to find its edge but given up. One of the goals of Jack’s lab is to map it completely, expose its limit.

He knows that studying fungus isn’t exactly cool, but giant mushrooms excite even the most scientifically disinclined.